John Beaumont, The Mississippi Flows Into the Tiber: A Guide to
Notable American Converts to the Catholic Church (South Bend, Indiana:
Fidelity Press, 2014), 1014 pp., $69, Hardcover.

Reviewed by Anne Barbeau Gardiner

Walker Percy once remarked that
the way to write about other people’s conversions is to examine “the causes
other than God’s grace.” This is what we find in John Beaumont’s The
Mississippi Flows Into the Tiber, an inspiring work that covers
nearly five hundred eminent American converts who lived from the 17th to the 21st century. In each of these entries, which are in
alphabetical order, we find a succinct biography and, when known, one or more
causes of conversion, often in the person’s own words. The entries range from
part of a page to several pages, with citations from the subjects’ writings. A
list of sources is also provided. This book will surely prove to be an
invaluable reference work, but more importantly, it is a collection of
priceless testimonies, well worth pondering at leisure.

When we study these entries, we
find a wide array of motives of conversion. This review will focus on only ten
of them: the Church’s visibility; her beauty; her universality; the Mass; the
Eucharist; the Virgin Mary; the saints; the Church’s continuity; her authority
in spiritual matters; and the Church’s moral teaching.

Virtually all these motives are
related to the Church as embodied in space and time. Indeed, the first motive
is that she is plainly visible, as befits the Body of Christ; the second, that
she is beautiful for her great legacy of architecture, music, art and
literature; the third, that she transcends all nationalities, ethnic groups,
and social classes. Also related to her embodiment are the fourth and fifth
motives: the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Eucharist. Some have been moved to
study the Catholic religion by attending a single Mass and becoming aware, as
Cora Stevens did, of “the presence of God.” Others were drawn into the Church
through devotion to the Virgin Mary or admiration for a saint.

Embodied in History

Besides being embodied in the
world, the Church is also embodied in history. Many have been attracted by
proofs of her unbroken continuity from the apostolic age to ours; they have
discovered that the early Fathers were in fact Catholic and that there was an
unbroken line of popes and bishops in lawful succession from St. Peter and the
Apostles to their own time. This motive is closely tied to the next one, the
Church’s authority. In this age of radical autonomy and subjectivity, a number
have been drawn to the Church by her claim of divine protection from error in
doctrine and morals. They have realized that this authority is necessary if she
is to withstand the gates of hell until the end of time. In the past fifty
years, the Church has often been the lone defender of traditional morality, not
least through papal encyclicals.

These are the ten motives to be
explored in this review of John Beaumont’s encyclopedic collection of American
converts, though we could approach this book from other perspectives as well.
For example, throughout these pages we see the influence of certain books on
conversions, such as the works of Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, John of the
Cross, Newman, Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Gilson. Then, too, some
entered at an early age, like Marco Rubio who at thirteen told his parents he
wanted to be a Catholic, and others, like Wallace Stevens, waited till their
deathbed. Some inched their way into the Church over the course of years, like
John Sparrow Thompson, the first Catholic Prime Minister of Canada, and others
converted in a flash, like Hilda van Stockum, who finished reading Arnold
Lunn’s Now
I See and exclaimed, “I’m not thinking about being a Catholic, I am a
Catholic.”

Together these entries also
form a grand parade of North American history. We find converts who fought in
the American Revolution, like Thomas Sim Lee, afterwards Governor of Maryland,
and others who fought in the Civil War, like the Confederate General James
Longstreet. We also find the Russian prince who became “the Apostle of the
Alleghenies” Demetrius Gallitzin, and the Kentucky poet John Milton Harney. We
meet the Alamo defender James Bowie, along with the “Father of Oregon” John
McLoughlin. We meet Kit Carson, Chief Black Elk, and Buffalo Bill, along with
Anne Brewster, the first female foreign correspondent, Karl Landsteiner, the
father of hematology and immunology, and James Roosevelt Bayley, the nephew of
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and first Bishop of Newark. Here too we meet Gerty
Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Science; Edmonia Lewis,
the first African-American and Native-American woman sculptor; and Sherman
Minton, a Supreme Court justice who ruled against racial segregation in 1954.

Among
recent converts we find Bernard Nathanson, the “Abortion King” who coined the
phrase “a woman’s right to choose”; Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of Roe v.
Wade; and Nellie Gray, the founder of the annual March for Life. Here too
are persons of notoriety, as among Christ’s first followers: the mobster Dutch
Schultz, received on his deathbed; Clayton Fountain, who went from murderer to
monk; Mildred Gillars, dubbed “Axis Sally”; and the Communist spy Elizabeth
Bentley. The Bride’s arms, like those of her Spouse, are opened wide.

The Church’s Visibility

A number of converts entered
the Ark when they realized that Jesus Christ instituted a visible, not an
invisible Church. The historian Ross Hoffman, who converted in 1931, wrote that
the early days of the Church are often thought to have a “dim historical
visibility,” but in fact no other phase of first-century history is “so
copiously documented.” Sheldon Vanauken (1981) aptly observed that “the
invisible church of the faithful” was never heard of till the 16th century, and the journalist Al Kresta
(1992) pointed out that the “invisibilists” deny “the materiality of Christ’s
Body, the Church,” yet she is an “extension of the Incarnation.”

Several, like Mark Brumley
(1980) and Thomas Howard (1985), were struck by the presence of a “concrete
visible institution,” an “embodied unity” back in the apostolic age. Robert Sungenis (1992) noted that the
word “church,” which appears over a hundred times in the New Testament, never
denotes a “spiritual” Church. Benedict Ashley (1938), who converted from
atheism, declared: the “sufficient sign” is “the moral miracle of the Catholic
church, the public fact that, in spite of all the frailties and scandals of its
members from top to bottom, including myself, it is one, catholic, apostolic
and holy in a way no merely human institution is or can be.” Richard Neuhaus (1990) observed that
Americans tend to be gnostic and imagine that “true spirituality” means
transcending “institutions, authority, history,” but God entered history once
and for all. Russell Reno (2004) recalls that what worked on him was the “fact”
of the Church, the “visible Church, with sacraments and rites which are
channels of invisible grace,” and Dwight Longenecker (1995), that the visible
Church appeared to him as “a sacrament of Christ,” a “living dynamic organism
empowered by the Holy Spirit.” Carl Olson (1997) sums it up: God works through
“physical matter” both in the Incarnation and in the Church.

Her Beauty

Some converts, like Thomas Storck (1978), were “convinced”
that the Faith was not only “true,” but also “compellingly attractive and
beautiful.” A few were attracted by medieval architecture: James Fry (1931)
visited Europe’s cathedrals and reflected that the faith that built such
“magnificent edifices” had to be from God; Robert Gordon Anderson (1950) became
a Catholic while writing two books on the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris;
and Peter Kreeft (1960) developed “a strong intellectual and aesthetic love for
things medieval: Gregorian chant, Gothic architecture, Thomistic philosophy,
illuminated manuscripts.”

Catholic music and art
attracted others: Justine Ward (1904) promoted Gregorian Chant because it was
the Church praying as a “corporate whole,” uttering the sacred words “slowly,
distinctly, pensively, each syllable lingered over as though with tenderness”;
Charles Rich (1933) believed that an image of Christ in a Catholic church had
spoken to his heart with “ineffable fragrance”; and the sculptor Frederick
Elliott Hart (1976) delved “deeper into the tradition of Western religious art”
and there found the Faith. Still others entered the Ark through literature:
Caroline Gordon (1947) thought her novels attained “greater depth” and were
“truer to reality” after she embraced “the Church’s vision of the world and
creation”; and Dean Ray Koontz found that being a Catholic enabled him to see
the world as “more mysterious, more organic and less mechanical.” According to
Father John Zuhlsdorf, the Church has given us a twofold legacy of beauty, art
and the saints: art is “God’s beauty shining through the inanimate material
creation,” and the saints are “his beauty shining out through living animate
people.” In both ways the Church transfigures life and culture.

Her Universality

At the start of the 20th century, Carlton Hayes (1904) deplored
the “zealous nationalism” of Europeans and attributed it to the “breakdown of
Catholic internationalism.” Many converts have since rejoiced in the universality
of the Church. For instance, Heywood Broun (1939) said he now felt “at home
everywhere,” able to shake hands with “brethren of every kindred, name, and
tongue.” Likewise, Jeffrey Steenson (2007) spoke of “the joy of belonging to a
really, really big family.”
Sensing a “new kinship” with people “in countries as diverse as
Argentina, Poland, and Zanzibar,” Paul Vitz (1979) saw his conversion as
linking him “to millions of people of all nations, races, and cultures.”

Many of those drawn to the Church’s
universality were motivated by what Robert Wagner (1946) called her “real
democracy.” In Catholic churches, Wagner saw “rich and poor alike sitting next
to each other” and members of the clergy drawn “almost without exception” from
“poor families.” Similarly, Edward Dodson (1938) observed “white and black,
merchant and laborer, rich and poor” kneeling at the altar “side by side.”
Years later, Annie Dillard (1990) expressed the same thought, that Catholics
are really “catholic”: “You go to a Catholic church, and there are people of
all different colors and ages, and babies squalling.”

Disillusioned with Communism,
Bella Dodd (1952) wandered into Midnight Mass one Christmas eve and reflected:
“Here were the masses I had sought, the people I wanted to love. Here was the
brotherhood of men, cemented by their love of God.” Another ex-Communist
Dorothy Day noticed that “the masses” in Catholic churches were “of all
nationalities, of all classes, but most of all they were the poor.” Similarly,
Dale Vree(1983) discovered that in the Church he could “emphatically
affirm both the rights of labor and the ancient creeds, reject both abortion
and the use of nuclear weapons, affirm both lifelong marriage and the dignity
of the poor.” Peter Weiskel (1978), too, found that the Church was at once “a
sanctuary for adoration and contemplation and an animator of political and
social reconstruction.” Here was a “big sprawling, international” institution,
Carol Zaleski (1991) reflected, where authority was found in “structures and
traditions,” not in “particular personalities.”

The Mass

A fourth motive for conversion
has been the experience of the Mass. Peter Burnett (1846), the first American
Governor of California, attended a Midnight Mass in Oregon and declared he had
“never witnessed anything like it before” for the “profound solemnity of the
services.” He felt drawn into a “closer and holier communion with the unseen
world.” B. Stuart Chambers, (1894) realized that the Mass meant a Love that
“only the heart of a God could conceive, only the omnipotence of a God effect.”
Like him, Daniel Sargent (1919) “discovered there and then what a sacrifice
was, and recognized this sacrifice as no invention of man, but as God’s own
act–Christ offering himself to God, the Father.”

While attending Mass, M.
Raphael Simon (1936) felt “the reverence which the Hebrews of old had
experienced in the temple of Jerusalem”; at the Sanctus, he sensed the “solemn
moment had arrived which in olden days came but once a year, when the high
priest entered into the Holy of Holies.” David Mills (2001) began “to love the
Catholic Church for the Mass, because in her my Lord and God came to me.” And
John Senior (1960), whose students founded Clear Creek Monastery in Oklahoma,
summed it up well when he said that Christian culture exists mainly to
perpetuate the Mass: “All architecture, art, political and social forms,
economics, the way people live and feel and think, music, literature–all these
things when they are right are ways of fostering and protecting the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass.”

The Eucharist

Since the Eucharist is the heart of Catholic life, it is no surprise
that many entered the Church after experiencing the Real Presence. Marion
Frances Gurney (1897) went to Benediction once with an Irish maid, and “With
the instinct of childhood, which sometimes brings undulled perceptions to holy
things, the child felt the Presence there.” Perhaps the most beautiful example
of this motive is Katherine Brégy (1904), who as a teenager made “shyly wistful
prayers before the tabernacle in nearby Catholic churches” and soon found her
visits taking on “the romance of a clandestine if supernatural love affair.”

The testimony of Lucile Hasley (1930) is equally stirring. While
visiting the Log Chapel at Notre Dame University, she asked the priest giving
her the tour, “If Catholics really believe that God is really and truly present
on their altars, why don’t they crawl into church on their hands and
knees?” Suddenly she realized that she was thinking: “Why aren’t we on
our hands and knees, right this minute, instead of standing here like
tourists?” And then there is little Ellen Tarry (1922), a black girl who was
placed in a Catholic boarding when her father died; after reading The
Prisoner of Love she “longed to march up to the communion rail and whisper,
‘Here I am, please make my poor heart your abode.’”

In
some cases, it was the reverence of Catholics for the Eucharist that set people
thinking, as when Rudolf Lippert (1947) attended a Benediction and saw the “deep
devotion” of the congregation: “It was this Real Presence, I discovered, which
explained their profound reverence.” Walker Percy (1947) recalled how one of
his college roommates, a fellow who “seemed otherwise normal,” used to get up
at dawn to go to daily Mass; this was one of the memories that made “room” for
the “most mysterious turning” of his life. Knute Rockne (1923) knew he was
missing something when he saw all the players on his football team sacrificing
“hours of sleep” to receive Communion, and Kimberley Hahn (1990) was moved to
learn that Catholics, after receiving, “saw themselves as living tabernacles.”

In other cases, it was
Scripture or the early Fathers that brought home the truth of the Real
Presence: David Currie (1993) said the Eucharist made him “fall in love with
the Catholic Church,” because it was the only Church in town that taught the
truth as Jesus stated it, that the Body of Christ is the food “needed for
eternity”;Francis Beckwith (2007) found the “Eucharistic realism” of
the early and medieval Church so persuasive that this “stumbling block” was
changed into a “cornerstone”; T. L. Frazier (1992) reported that he “nearly
suffered cardiac arrest” when he read in the letters of Ignatius, a convert of
the Apostle John, that heretics stayed away from the Eucharist because they
would not admit it was “the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ which suffered for
our sins and which the Father in his goodness afterwards raised up again”; and
Leroy Huizenga (2011) became convinced that John 6 spoke of the Eucharist as
the “medicine of immortality” and Paul, of “our real participation in the body
and blood of Christ.”The “real heresy of our age,” Marshall McLuhan
(1937) said, was “gnosticism,” or the denial of the natural world. He believed
the Eucharist was its “ultimate refutation.”

Other sacraments, too, have
attracted people to the Faith. Bernard Nathanson (1976), after overseeing
around 75,000 abortions and performing around 5,000 himself, was “gripped by
despair.” Influenced by Karl Stern’s Pillar
of Fireand talks with C. John McCloskey, he finally received Baptism.
Felix Robinson (1952) converted after learning that the Church alone considered
marriage a sacrament, something that made marriage “primarily a spiritual
vocation” and allowed children to be “willingly born.” Confession has drawn its
share of converts: Levi Silliman Ives (1852), the first bishop to be reconciled
since the Reformation, deplored the lack of any “instituted method among
Protestants for the remission of post-baptismal sin”; similarly, James Akin
(1992) noticed that Protestants made no use of Christ’s gift to the Apostles of
the power to “forgive sins.” Horatio Storer (1879) gave credit to the sacrament
of Confession for the rarity of abortion among Catholic women, while Gene
Fowler (1950) was pleased that Catholics could always find a confessional
nearby into which they could go “with feelings of trepidation, but emerge
therefrom with a deep sense of peace and forgiveness.”

The concreteness of Catholic
worship has drawn many into the fold. On Holy Thursday 1904, Elizabeth Kite
joined “a procession to kiss the feet of the crucified Jesus,” a devotion
harking back to the 4th
century. As she kissed the crucifix, she found herself transformed: “what had
happened was the miracle of Belief – a pure gift from the heart of
Jesus.” Similarly, Lars Troide (2008) realized that “the sign of the cross, the
incense, the rosary beads, the Hail Mary, the bells, the Latin” all made sense
because they raised the soul to God, but the clincher for him was prayer for
the souls in Purgatory: “It makes such sense that almost no one at death is
pure enough to be in the presence of God, and that a spiritual purification is
necessary.” He found “joy” in praying for his deceased wife and hastening her
entry “into the Beatific Vision.”

The Virgin Mary

Perhaps the most charming conversion wrought through the Virgin Mary
is that of Francis Fitzpatrick (1936). As a youth he wandered into a Catholic
church out of curiosity and saw people praying before a statue. Immediately he
went into the rectory next door to tell the pastor he had now seen Catholics
worshiping “idols.” The priest explained that statues were prototypes of “real
people in Heaven” whose intercession the Catholics were seeking. Then he showed
him how the Hail Mary came straight out of Scripture. Fitzpatrick recalled that
this was “the beginning of my falling in love with the Blessed Mother.” It led
to his conversion and ordination: “No one can trifle with the Mother of God. If
he will love her, she will have him.”

Asking Our Lady for guidance
has often had a powerful effect. A case in point is St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
(1805) who, having lost her mother as a child and being comforted to know “that
the Blessed Virgin was truly her mother,” asked Mary to guide her to the “True
Faith.” Likewise, Susan Emery (1874) asked the Virgin’s help and shortly
afterwards opened a volume of sermons belonging to her Irish servant and came
across these words of St. Ambrose: “Show me Peter, and I will show you the
Church.” She believed that her “cry for help to the Blessed Virgin” had been
“manifestly answered.” Walter Jones (1974) traced his conversion to seeing a
fellow cadet at the military academy praying the rosary on his knees, while Lee
Atwater (1990) traced his to a Catholic nurse who asked if she might
pin a Miraculous Medal on his clothing.

Not all of those touched by the
Virgin Mary led exemplary lives. After winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1954, Ernest Hemingway (who considered himself a Catholic from 1918) traveled
to the shrine of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre to thank Our Lady and left
his prize medal there as a gift. More surprisingly, Louis Budenz, (1945), the
editor of The Daily Worker, was speaking one day with Fulton Sheen and
defending Communism, when Sheen bent forward and said, “Let us now talk of the
Blessed Virgin.” Budenz recalled being immediately “conscious of the
senselessness and sinfulness of my life as I then lived it.”

The Saints

Living examples of holiness
have brought many into the fold. Take the case of Erasmus Darwin Keyes (1866),
who was inspired by a priest he met in the American wilderness, “a cultivated
gentleman in the prime of life” who was “content” to labor fourteen years among
Native Americans. Likewise Daniel Sargent (1919), who had volunteered for the
ambulance corps of the French army in 1916 and had witnessed how French priests
behaved under fire as they ministered to dying men, exclaimed, “I had caught
sight of the divinity of the Church.”Similarly, in the 1832 cholera
epidemic in Philadelphia, William Horner (1839) was so “impressed with the work
of Catholic priests and nuns” that he “wanted to know more of the faith which
produced such works.”

Sometimes the saint was not a
doer but a sufferer: Joyce Kilmer (1913) used to stop to pray for the gift of faith
in the Church of the Holy Innocents, in New York, but when faith came it did so
“by way of my little paralyzed daughter. Her lifeless hands led me. I think her
tiny feet still know beautiful paths.” Mary Agnes Tincker (1855) traced her
conversion to seeing a Catholic priest “tarred-and-feathered by a mob of
Know-Nothing agitators.”

According to William Starr
(1861), the type of holiness found in the Church has no parallel among “the
most devout souls” outside her “fold.”
One such saint who died in Rome on April 16, 1783, was the beggar
Benedict Joseph Labré. Within three months of his death there were 136
miraculous cures. The Congregationalist minister John Thayer, who was in Rome
at the time, set out to investigate and disprove these miracles, but instead
“found himself convinced by the evidence” and entered the Church on May 25 of
that year.

A visit to a saint’s shrine has
sometimes triggered a conversion. Frances Parkinson Keyes (1939) was in St.
Anne of Beaupré in Canada when, “in one blinding flash, my whole life was
transformed,” while Fulton Oursler (1943) was standing at the shrine of St.
Bernadette, in St. Francis of Assisi Church in New York, when “Any doubts or
reservations he had about becoming a Catholic evaporated.” Sometimes the life of
a saint has wrought the same change: after reading the life of St. Francis
Xavier in a little book belonging to his Irish servant girl, Virgil Barber
(1818) asked himself, “How could a
religion that formed such men be a mere human institution?” The black author
Elizabeth Adams (1982) converted after reading the lives of Rose Hawthorne and
Father Damien of the Lepers, while Katherine Anne Porter (1906) collected
biographies of her favorite saints, Joan of Arc, Ursula, Teresa of Avila, Anne,
and Catherine of Siena. The writings of saints, too, have sometimes proved
life-altering. Paul Thigpen
(1993), while reading Augustine, Catherine of Sienna, and John of the Cross,
sensed that these works were “doorways into a communion with the saints who had
written them. I felt their presence as I read; I even found myself talking to
them, though my theological training told me that such conversations weren’t
permitted.”

The Church’s Continuity

Although she has undergone
development over the course of two millennia, the Church has essentially
remained the same. Inspired by this “massive historical fact,” Peter Kreeft
(1960) has spoken of the Church as “the same old seaworthy ship, the Noah’s ark
that Jesus had commissioned ... the whole ark itself, still sailing unscathed
on the seas of history!” This fact caused Sophia Willard Ripley (1847) to
exclaim: “Here is a Church that is immortal. She has withstood the treason of
her own children and the pride of her unworthy servants.”

Our Lord promised that the
Church would never fail, but what about the evil deeds of some of her leaders?
“If they proved anything,” Duane Hunt (1913) replied, “it was that the Catholic
Church is indestructible.” A “mere human institution” would be crushed by now,
but Christ’s Church “is continuous from Him to the present day and will be
continuous until the end of the world.” The more Avery Dulles (1940) studied
this matter, the more evidence he saw of the Church’s continuity: “Through the
dark ages and enlightened, through ages of fervor and ages of corruption, under
saintly popes and ordinary popes, the treasure of the faith had been preserved
intact.” As the Gospels showed, Christ had established the Church “to keep His
doctrine incorrupt and to carry on his work of sanctifying souls,” so He and the
Church were “two facets of a single mystery.”Likewise, Robert Wilken
(1994) declared that the Church he had joined was “continuous through history
going back to the Apostles” and “the most significant thing that the
Incarnation brought about.” While reading Newman’s Essay
on the Church’s continuity, Dave Armstrong (1991) “experienced a peculiar,
intense, and inexpressibly mystical feeling of reverence for the idea of a
Church ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic.’”

This continuity has had an
application for the interpreting of Scripture. John Lawson Stoddard (1922)
pointed out that the Church had been guiding her flock for sixty years before
the New Testament was completed and for “more than three hundred years before
the Canon of the New Testament was definitely fixed.” Since then, there had
been “no suspension of her life, no break in her history, no term of silence in
her teaching.” More recently, John Wright (2008) has urged that the New
Testament “cannot have more authority, cannot be trusted more than the Church
who wrote it, compiled it, protected and transmitted it, interprets it and teaches
from it.” And Laura Garcia (1981) has argued that if Scripture were our only
guide, then each of us would have to know enough Greek, Hebrew, and Near
Eastern history to decide, when faced with new theological opinions, what
Scripture really taught; but it is doubtful that God left “the essential
doctrines of the faith so inaccessible to the average layperson and so open to
revision.”

Another aspect of the Church’s
continuity is her stable moral doctrine in the face of a licentious world.
James Kent Stone (1869) rejoiced that the war of infidelity against the Church
confirmed her identity: “Surely this undying hate of the world is a sign which
cannot be misunderstood. To be hated of the world is a note of the Church. ‘If
the world hate you, know ye that it hated me before you.’” Joseph Sobran (1961)
also rejoiced that the Church remained “consistent” in her moral teaching
despite “the world’s strident demand that she change along with it.” Although
“powerless, hardly able to keep her own flock in line, and betrayed by many of
her shepherds,” the Church was still a “threat” to the world because she
disturbed “dormant consciences.” Sobran, too, thought the world’s hostility was
proof of the Church’s “divine origin and authority.”

Her Authority

A number have entered the Ark
because the Church dared to exercise authority in matters of faith and morals.
A great example of this daring comes from Christopher Huntington (1937), who
was in Germany in the mid 1930s and heard Cardinal Faulhaber, in Cologne
Cathedral, attack what the Nazis stood for. Huntington saw in this “the awful
magnitude of the Church’s claim,” but also saw that the “true Church” could not
“claim less.” As Thomas Emmet (1864) put it: “No other body has ever dared to
claim, as the Catholic Church has, from the beginning to the present time, to
have been vested directly by our Lord with the power to teach as His
representative on earth.”

Scott Hahn (1986) asked, “How
many churches are even applying for the job of being the pillar and foundation
of truth?” He replied, “I only know of one. I only know that the Roman Catholic
Church teaches that it was founded by Christ; it’s been around for 2000 years
and it’s making some outlandish claims that seem awfully similar to 1 Timothy
3:15.” In like manner, Marcus Grodi (1992), when he read in Irenaeus that “the
truth” is “easily obtained from the Church” because the apostles “deposited
with her most copiously everything which pertains to the truth,” realized that
“the single most important issue was authority.”

The alternative to Church
authority is private judgment. As Caryl Coleman (1868) found out, the more one
studied “the history of private judgment, the source of heresy and schism,” the
more one saw that the Church “must of necessity be endowed with a continuity of
authority and doctrine, or it could not be of God.” In Scripture, the Church
was invested with authority at the commissioning of Peter. As Jeffrey Steenson
(2007) has explained, Christ there used “three verbs in the future tense”: “I
will build my Church”; “the gates of hell will not prevail”; and “I will give
you the keys of the kingdom.” The future tense showed that the commission was
not meant to end with the “historical Peter” but “anticipated” the entire
history of the Church.

Then, at the Council of
Jerusalem, in Acts 15, the Church exercised her authority. As Mark Shea (1987)
has explained, all those attending the Council were circumcised, and nothing
was clearer in Scripture than that circumcision was “required by God for ever
and ever.” Yet the Council decided: “No, we don’t need to do this anymore.”
Why? Because they interpreted Scripture “in the light of the Apostolic
tradition; and the Church has continued to do that to this day.” Without
“ecclesiastical authority,” Benjamin Wiker (1987) noted, none of the creeds
would exist. In the Church’s “claim to speak with authority” Ian Hunter (2006)
saw the “last refuge” against “the all-corrosive acid of postmodernism.”

Church authority is often
exercised through a pope. James Kent Stone observed (1869) that the papacy
“does not contain in itself any apparent principle of life and growth, and yet
it continues to put forth the signs of immortal youth after empires have fallen
and passed away.” A good example was Pope John Paul II. In him Helen Hull
Hitchcock (1984) saw a “clear sign that the Holy Spirit truly was with this
Church,” and Jeffrey Rubin (1984)rightly called this pope “a moral
Colossus” who “bestrode the world” and showed “the matchless potential of this
great office for world spiritual leadership.”

Her Moral Teaching

In the last fifty years, the moral teaching of the Church has
spurred many conversions. Hadley Arkes (2010) saw her as a “sign of
contradiction” for the age, due to her “moral witness, especially on the sanctity
of human life and on marriage and sexual morality.” E. Michael Jones (1973)
wrote, “During the entire post-World War II period in the United States, the
Catholic Church opposed the main article of faith in secular humanism, namely,
sexual liberation.” She stood out against the “sexual revolution,” which was
the “rationalization of sexual vice, followed by the political mobilization of
the same thing as a form of control.” In a similar vein, Leroy Huizenga (2011)
pointed out that when we deal with sexuality, we are dealing with “matters of
public concern” and the “common good.”
In sum, sexuality is far from being an issue of “privacy rights.”

Quite a number of converts have
entered the Church because of her teaching on contraception. One such person
was Robert V. Young (1974), who said that Humanae
Vitaewas “instrumental” in bringing him and his wife into the fold,
“not only because the teaching is true, but because it was so plainly the work
of the Holy Spirit guiding the Vicar of Christ.” They realized that “flesh and
blood did not teach” this doctrine to Pope Paul VI, “nor was it his own rather
retiring character that furnished the fortitude to proclaim this sign of
contradiction to a hostile world.” Another such person was Steve Wood (1990)
who, when he shared a prison cell with Catholics involved in Operation Rescue,
learned from them that the abortion holocaust was the “direct result” of the
contraceptive revolution. He then started to wonder why “the Catholic Church
alone” held the “line” in this “vital area.” Like him, Scott Hahn (1986) was
“bothered” by the fact that the Catholic Church alone upheld “this age-old
Christian teaching rooted in Scripture.” David Mills (2001) recalled that
contraception “ranked high” among the things that drew him and his wife into
the Church; and Jay Richards asked himself why Christians had opposed contraception
before the 20th century and had
then let themselves be influenced by a culture “increasingly hostile to
fertility and chastity.”

Others entered the fold because
of the Church’s stand against abortion. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1995), formerly
a Marxist and radical feminist, finally understood that “Abortion devalues and
debases women’s bodies–strips them of their character as temples of the Holy
Spirit” and confirms “their status as objects to be used.” And Jennifer Ferrara
(1998) converted when her church “decided to cover the cost of the abortions of
their employees” and refused to offer any “authoritative stance on a single
matter having to do with sexual ethics or the sanctity of human life.” She
understood then that “Christians cannot do without a magisterium that
interprets Scripture in the light of the great Tradition of the Church.”
Similarly, when his girlfriend’s father forced her to have an abortion, film
producer Jason Simon Jones (2003) got involved in pro-life work, lamenting that
ever since the sexual revolution arrived, “we have almost forgotten how to form
families or what they are.”

In its moral teaching the
Church strongly defends free will. To quote Harry Crocker (circa 2001): When
others say that sex is uncontrollable, the Catholic Church alone replies, “No,
man is free. All Christians are called to chastity, and what they are called to
do, they can do.” A case in point is actor Kevin O’Brien (2000), who says he
“struggled with the Church’s teaching on some of the sex issues,” but once he
began praying the rosary and trying to obey the Church’s teaching, he found
that “whole new worlds of grace opened up.”

All the converts listed in John
Beaumont’s inspiring compilation have impressive credentials. Although they are
not mentioned in this review, these credentials may be found in the biographies
provided in The Mississippi Flows Into the Tiber.

In conclusion, Chief Black Elk,
an Oglala holy man who fought in the Battle of Little Big Horn and was injured
at the Wounded Knee Massacre, entered Mother Church in 1904. He embraced the
Catholic religion as “the full revelation of the Wakan Tanka” (Lakota for God),
and declared that the “spiritual experiences” of the Lakota people had
“prepared them for Christ.” Here we find another aspect of the Church’s
continuity: She completes and fulfills the natural religions that have existed
since the dawn of time. Black Elk was confident that he was being true to his
heritage, that the “essence” of Lakota practices could be found in Catholic
worship. Four hundred Lakotas followed him into the Church. Around the same
time, Frederick Joseph Kinsman (1916) visited a cathedral in Philadelphia and
had a “vivid sense of the Church as a great Mother, very wistful and very
tender.” Find one other American institution that can make that claim.

Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor
Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York.

The Mississippi Flows
Into the Tiber: A Guide to Notable American Converts to the Catholic Church, $69 + S&H. (When ordering for shipment outside
the United States, the price will appear higher to offset increased shipping
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